“Since the Renaissance and the
Enlightenment have now passed, is not religious belief a useless
tool of the ignorant?”

Here is the comment and question:

“As a rational person I find all
religiousness to be an insult to human intelligence. I read the
following statement somewhere and it seems to sum up where I
stand:
We are no longer a religious country, we have had the Renaissance
and the Enlightenment. Science won, and the rest is just cultural
inertia. (Inertia: inaction, passiveness, laziness). Is it
not fair to say that religious belief should only now be seen as
a useless tool of the ignorant?”

My Reply:

You will have to excuse me when I say
that I was somewhat amused by your comment. Why amused? Because
it is a rather old-fashioned comment on religion. Culturally, the
statement really seems to epitomize the age of great scientific
optimism which, I would say, was circa 1870-1960.
Modernism was then in its heyday and the feeling was truly
widespread that science could solve all the problems of mankind,
as long as we gave scientists sufficient money for research! Yes,
some bastions of Modernism continue to exist, without
doubt, but it is they which are now anachronisms (mistakes in
time), for Post-Modernism is now much more the new and current
worldview.

Modernism essentially dismissed religion
which it tended to view as either animistic or as established
religion, but the Post-modernist would be bound to question such a narrow view of
what 'religion' is and the Post-modernist says, 'We were wrong to place all our
faith in science. We have had two devastating world wars as a
result of the thinking that science could solve all ills. Also,
what of the tragedies of thalidomide and similar scientific
failures?'

Post-modernism is much more interested in
people and in their culture and places great importance on the
poetic, inspirational, religious and especially on the
interpretation of such poetic/inspirational/religious
areas. Unfortunately, it places all religions on an equal basis
and has a strong liking for multi-culturalism, but let us at
least recognise that post-modernism is not necessarily
anti-religious whereas Modernism sought to place science on the
throne formerly occupied by established religion. That is why I
say that I find your question rather old-fashioned in approach.
The old idea that religion and science had to be enemies is just
that: very old and, in the light of current knowledge, a
somewhat foolish concept. Of course, the media still loves to
assume this outmoded notion but deeper philosophical thinkers
will admit that things have now moved on. For example, it is now
increasingly recognised that “religion” is not
necessarily something that people do in a church or in a mosque.
New Ageism reminds us all that religion does not have to worship a God in heaven; large areas of New Ageism believe that men and women are already gods who are answerable to no one. No, a person's religion is the major motivating/devotional factor of
their lives: it could be a football team and it could even be
Neo-Darwinism!

You start off by calling yourself
“a rational person” and therefore you feel
that what you call “religiousness” is an
insult to human intelligence. I feel that you might be a devout
evolutionist, but did you know that the latest thinking on
Neo-Darwinism would state that, whatever evolution is, it is
NOT a rational belief. The odds against macro-evolution
having occurred (human descent from apes) are so incredibly huge
that they defy belief! If your mind is open enough,hereis an article which discusses just a few
of the scientific problems which frankly, make evolution
virtually impossible! You think I am exaggerrating? No, I am not.
Scientists will frequently say things like, 'We know that
life arising from non-life is frankly impossible, yet as
scientists we must support it!' If you have never read devout
evolutionists making such frankly absurd and unscientific statements then, frankly, you have not
read too much on the subject! Mathematician
William Dembski calculated that if the probability of something
occurring by chance is less than one in 10150, it has no
possibility of happening by chance at any time by any conceivable
process throughout all of cosmic history. He further estimates
that the probability of evolving the first cell (yes, just the first cell!), is no better than
one in 104,478,146. (Source: Impact magazine,
November 1999). You may also want to check out the incredible odds against just randomly spelling 'The Theory of Evolution' with scrabble letters here.

Mathematician/astronomer Fred
Hoyle put it this way. He said that the probability of evolution
creating the living world by chance is like believing that "...a
tornado sweeping through a junk yard might assemble a Boeing 747
from the materials therein." (See Evolution from Space,
Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasingne, J.M. Dent & Sons,
1981).
Michael Denton states that probability science comes "very close
to a formal disproof of the whole Darwinian paradigm of nature.
By what strange capacity do living organisms defy the laws of
chance which are apparently obeyed by all analogous complex
systems?" (page 316, Michael Denton,, Evolution: A Theory in
Crisis, Adler & Adler, 1986). Denton, a physician and
molecular biologist, provides a stinging intellectual attack on
evolution. This book is one of the classics on the
topic.

So I personally would agree that
“religiousness” may occasionally be an insult to ones
intelligence, especially if the “religiousness” under
consideration is evolution. You say that 'science won' but
actually it did not. All that happened with the Renaissance and
then the Enlightenment was that religious belief and religious
adoration was moved from God to Man, and “science”
was the loser. Good science and good scientists cannot live with
the contradictions of evolution. And some of the greatest
scientists of all time were not evolutionists but avid supporters
of Divine Creation though you have probably never heard this
before. Some of the great scientists (past and present) who have
supported belief in Divine creation
include:

Gerald E. Aardsma (physicist and radiocarbon
dating)

Louis Agassiz (helped develop the study of
glacial geology and of ichthyology)

But this is far too big a subject to tackle here. If
your mind is sufficiently open, probably the single best book to
get would be John Blanchard's Does God Believe in
Atheists? (ISBN 0 85234 460 0).
However, having read your comment and question I tend to doubt that you have an open and inquiring mind. My feeling is that you show a devotion to atheism which is frankly religious. If that is so, then you are defeated by your very own argument; moreover, should evolution actually be correct, then your arguments are immediately rendered no more meaningful than mine.